As the fall weather becomes cooler, Christmas service prep inevitably heats up. Before we know it, we’re smack in the middle of that crazy season of meetings, design, and all-nighters to try and get our churches ready for one of the biggest and most important events of the year.
While it’s very easy to simply put our blinders on and fall headfirst into the Christmas world, we must be very intentional with how we handle ourselves leading up to that season of busyness. If we don’t prep things the right way, what should be a fun and joyous season can leave a trail of destruction behind.
I believe there are three key areas where we have to make sure we do our due diligence on the front end so that things are fully set up for Christmas success.
Your Gear
It would be a terrible nightmare to have critical equipment failure during a Christmas event. So, we need to make sure we’re doing our best to prep our equipment for the long and important season that’s on our radar.
Preventative maintenance this time of year is a critical process to think through. Do you need to purchase spare replacement items like gaff tape, batteries, widgets, etc., just in case you need something last-minute? Should you replace all of your lighting or projector lamps to ensure that nothing is close to a critical failure zone?
You can also clean projector filters, scrub mic capsules, check for critical firmware updates, etc. all proactively. Better to do that work on the front end and prevent a failure than to have to respond in the middle of a service.
Also, if your area is prone to intense winter weather and power outages, is there anything you can do that would help mitigate potential failure areas? You can check that critical components are on UPS’s, test the building’s generator, and even communicate with your pastor and worship teams to ensure that you have a communication plan in place in the event of a last-minute issue.
Your Team
Whether you will be relying on staff or volunteers, your Christmas production will likely require an army of willing and able servants. And amidst all of the long hours and stress, you need to ensure that you’re staying focused on keeping spirits high and team morale healthy.
If you need help for a long night installing a new set design, the best thing you can do for your team is to also provide food while they work.
In addition, if you need people to spend extra time at the church for rehearsals, you must ensure that you’re giving as much advance notice as possible so that those people have ample warning to adjust their schedules and personal lives accordingly.
And once you have locked in on a service schedule, you need to ensure that your teams are setting healthy expectations with their families regarding the commitment level and time involved.
When you focus on advance planning and communication, you can add tremendous value to your team and show them that you really care about them and their lives. Sometimes last-minute requests are inevitable and are our only option, but you need to limit those as much as possible.
Knowing that this will be a busy season, you should also ensure that you’re constantly thanking the team for their service, and repeatedly reminding them of the impact they are making. Countless lives will be eternally changed because of their selfless sacrifice. But if you’re not reminding them of the “win” of the season, it will become easier for them to feel burnt out or like they’re just a cog that has to keep grinding in order for the machine to work.
Yourself
Sometimes this is the inevitable area that gets overlooked. We wholeheartedly throw ourselves into Christmas prep and execution, spending long hours at the church and with our teams. We may be doing our best to selflessly keep our families in the loop about the scheduling demands, but it’s actually OK to be selfish too!
On the surface, that makes no sense…it’s not Biblical to be selfish.
But as a leader, if you’re not first focused on keeping yourself healthy, then it’s almost impossible for you to lead your team well and keep them healthy.
So, your first responsibility during any crazy season is really to make sure you’re taking care of yourself. And unfortunately, this is usually the one thing that gets overlooked.
It may be fun (or a badge of honor, of sorts) to boast that we have worked 17 days straight, averaging two hours of sleep a night and 15 cans of Red Bull per day. But our bodies weren’t designed to sustain that pace, and we’re going to end up physically and mentally crashing.
We have to make sure that we’re prioritizing a reasonably normal sleep schedule, and we need to be eating food that doesn’t come out of a vending machine or from a fast-food drive-thru window. We need to drink things that aren’t packed with sugar and caffeine.
Don’t neglect your Sabbath and spiritual health during that season, either. If you become dry spiritually, it will get much too easy to see the Christmas season as a job or performance instead of a worship experience or sacrifice. And the behavior you model becomes contagious to your teams too.
Also, when we’re running low on sleep and high on stress, it becomes a lot easier for our emotions to short-circuit, and we can find ourselves acting and reacting in abnormal ways: snapping at small annoyances, showing our frustration too easily, and overreacting when things disrupt our plans.
Christmas will probably always be a busy season for church techs, and it’s important that we enter that season with a proper perspective and frame of mind.
Keeping yourself healthy is the most critical component to healthy leadership, and without that, you’ll be unable to provide your teams and your gear the proper focus and effort that they need.
